The police murder of Abdullah Abdul Muhliman, a/k/a Detric Driver, brought to mind a horrific history of virtually identical multi-agency raids resulting in the murders of #ImanLuqmanAbdullah in 2009, #AiyanaJones, 7, in 2010, and #TerranceKellom in 2015.

Expert depiction of Aiyana Jones’ killing in 2010.

Mr. Muhliman, also known as #DullahBeard, was subjected to the same tactics used in the murder of Aiyana Jones. A flash bang grenade was thrown into the home where he lay asleep on the couch, then police entered en masse and summarily executed him.

In 2010, little Aiyana was sleeping on a couch underneath the window where the grenade was thrown. The first Detroit cop on the scene, Joseph Weekley, Jr., wielding an MP5 submachine gun, shot the child through the head seconds after her family’s unlocked door was battered down.

After two mistrials, he was freed while Aiyana’s father Charles Jones and uncle Chauncey Owens were sentenced to decades in prison based on the questionable testimony of jailhouse snitches.

#DullahBeard was a follower of Imam Luqman Abdullah, leader of a mosque in Detroit’s Black community in a poor west side neighborhood, according to recent reports.

Imam Abdullah was assassinated in 2009 during a sting operation by the FBI, and police from Detroit and Dearborn. He was shot 21 times after he defended himself from a police dog which had been let loose to bite him.

#DullahBeard was among the Masjif El-Haqq mosque members the FBI indicted on trumped-up charges, based largely on hearsay accounts by confidential informants who had infiltrated the group. The indictment cited alleged conversations with mosque members, not actual criminal activities.

The FBI investigation was linked to the group’s ties with Imam Jamil El-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown), both of them peaceful organizers of Black youth and families in their poverty-stricken communities. Similar FBI stings were conducted against groups of Black men in Florida and New York during the same time period.

Terrance Kellom, 19, had one child and a second on the way. He and his father Kevin Kellom had been observed going to the store by the raid team before they launched the assault on his father’s home on Evergreen in Detroit, close to the same neighborhood where Dullah Beard was killed.

Kevin Kellom holds granddaughter Terranae Kellom, born after her father Terrance’s murder, as Terrance’s son Terrance Desmond Kellom looks on.

There was admittedly a warrant out for the young man’s arrest, which could have easily been carried out on the street. However, the raid team chose to flex their might by bursting into the Kellom home, forcing the young man down the stairs from an upstairs bedroom, and then executing him with eight shots in front of his father.

They claimed he was wielding a hammer, but when Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy held a press conference announcing she would not prosecute his killers, she admitted that no fingerprints were found on the hammer.

Detroit Police Chief James Craig has attempted to cloak the police terror and military tactics still being visited on Detroit’s poor and Black residents by putting on a bland face and claiming a new day has dawned in police-community relations.

The murder of #DullahBeard, preceded by raids on poverty-stricken neighborhoods beginning with the former Colony Arms Apartments on East Jefferson and the Martin Luther King housing complex, shows that is a blatant lie. Craig spent 28 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. He was part of an internal team that looked into crimes committed by LAPD cops in the Ramparts district, including a murder of a man in custody and frame-ups of dozens more, and whitewashed their actions. Later, however, the U.S. Justice Department put the LAPD under a consent decree like that the Detroit Police Department emerged from after a 10-year span.

In their hunt for a baby killer last week, Detroit police raided a west side home before dawn. A stun grenade was thrown into the house to disorient occupants. Then police breached the front door.

Seconds later, a 46-year-old man lying on the living room couch was dead.

The dead man, Abdullah Abdul Muhiman, [#JusticeforDullahBeard] was not the suspect in the killing of a five-year-old girl hours earlier. He was an innocent man who had the unfortunate luck to be sleeping on the couch. To make a bad scene worse, the suspected gunman the police were looking for was miles away.

And yet the police assault team and their superior officers were unaware of that fact, Deadline Detroit has learned. This utter collapse in police work, however, did not stop Chief of Police James E. Craig from announcing at a press conference just hours later, that Muhiman had gotten what he deserved.

“If you point a gun at officers, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a suspect in any other case,” he said.

“The officers breached the door and made entry, the first officer through the door said ‘get down, get down, get down.”

Detroit police chief James Craig holds up a photo showing a gun similar to that he claimed was wielded during the #DullahBeard assassination. The Detroit Police Department has not released the bodycam videos or other footage of the assault. Photo: Detroit Police Department

According to Craig’s version, Muhiman leveled an AR-15 pistol-grip semi-automatic at the officers from the sofa cushions. In response, the raid team’s point man fired several shots, killing Muhiman. Craig said his review of body cam footage could not confirm the gun-pointing scenario, since it was too dark. A gun was recovered next to Muhiman’s corpse, police say.

Muhiman’s people are not buying it.

“The chief is a clown,” said Jermaine Carey, a close friend of Muhiman. “Hours after the police kill Abdullah, Craig is holding up a picture of the supposed gun, putting out his criminal history, painting him as a criminal who was to blame for his own killing. But what did he do? Jump up from a couch with someone breaking in the house? What you expect him to do? He had nothing to do with anything.”

Spectacular Lapse

Detroit police with direct knowledge of last weeks events call it a spectacular lapse in police tactics.

A classmate of Aiyana Jones holds her photo while her father Charles Jones and another relative grieve for the child the morning after police assaulted the home. The toys surrounding the porch were there during the raid, and Aiyana’s cousin, outside walking his dogs, cried out to the police: “There’s kids in the house.” Not only Aiyana, but her two toddler brothers were present. During subsequent trials, police testimony showed that the DPD had the house under surveillance the previous day and saw the target of the raid, Chauncey Owens, exit onto the street several times. He could have been peacefully arrested instead. In reality, the raid comprised “regular police procedure.” Photo: Diane Bukowski

“What we normally do, is put surveillance on the house and wait for somebody to go to the liquor store in the morning,” one official told me, speaking on condition of anonymity, fearing disciplinary action for speaking candidly. “Once he comes out, you stop him, you put him in custody and you get the intel about who’s in the house, who’s got what weapon, and where they are. We do that, obviously, to avoid scenarios like this one.”

Said another ranking cop: “The team got amped up. They wanted to get a baby-killer. They went too fast and now we have a total fuck-up. We have a man dead, and a good cop who was doing his job who now has to live with this.”

A woman who is a suspected accomplice in the child-killing was arrested at the house during the raid. And the man suspected of actually shooting the child (he also shot the girl’s mother 16 times) was arrested later in the afternoon, miles away, near the scene of the child’s murder. Both have since been released from custody, due to lack of evidence.

A conversation I had with one of Chief Craig’s right-hand men went like this:

Me: “Why didn’t you have eyes on the house?”

Investigator: “We did.”

Me: “Then why did you go in, with a guy on the couch and the gunman somewhere else?”

Investigator: “How are we supposed to know who’s in the house?”

Me: “Because you had the house under surveillance.”

Investigator: “Well, we arrested somebody didn’t we?”

Me: “Yeah, but an innocent man is dead and the two suspects in the child’s murder are walking around the streets.”

Investigators: “Well, they’re still suspects as we continue to put the case together.”

Who’s to Blame?

DPD Chief James Craig on cover of NRA magazine in June, 2014 after he urged Detroit homeowners to arm themselves.

Where is the accountability? Michigan State Police from Flint are now investigating. But if the details provided by the chief are correct, the officer who fired the shots cannot be blamed here. He was doing his job, following orders. Ultimately, responsibility lay with the man in charge and the culture he has incubated within the department.

Remember, Craig is the man who showed up on the cover of an NRA magazine encouraging Detroiters to purchase firearms to protect their homes. It is also worth remembering that it is not uncommon for crime crews to pose as police officers before busting into homes. It is also worth remembering that Muhiman’s shooting death is the latest in a string of embarrassing, violent or deadly episodes in the police department in recent months, episodes that Craig has promised to provide answers to, but has failed to do so.

Remember, the police commander moonlighting as a security guard and beating a party goer into a coma; two undercover police units pointing guns at each other and fist fighting on a porch, and the death of an on-duty officer driving in excess of 100 miles an hour on city streets to name a few. The use of force by police officers is a major issue in American life. In Detroit, it seems, not so much. But the public here, like anywhere else, deserves answers and justice demands them.

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